The Immanent Frame

In the latest issue of Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens takes a stab at re-founding western culture.

The New York Times reports on abuse allegations within the Church of Scientology.

A new book by the german philosopher Theodor Ebert makes the claim that “Descartes died not through natural causes but from an arsenic-laced communion wafer given to him by a Catholic priest.”

The University of California at Riverside will host a two day conference entitled Saving the Sacred in a Secular Age on February 26-27. Participants include Charles Taylor, Hubert Dreyfus, and Sean Kelly.

On Tuesday the British Government granted Davender Ghai, a British Hindu, the right to “a good death”—defined as cremation on a funeral pyre open to the sky—reports the Telegraph.

Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka describes the desperate situation in his native Nigeria in an interview with The Daily Beast’s Tunku Varadarajan.

Ever since the capture of John Walker Lindh, the so-called “American Taliban,” the media has been on the lookout for overly enthusiastic high school students who convert to Islam and end up on the front lines of the war on terror.

In an article published this week in USA Today, Tom Krattenmaker explores the directed effort by religious groups to infiltrate the wide world of sports, in order to exert their influence.

Julia Kristeva’s latest work, This Incredible Need to Believe, explores the fundamental role of belief within the psyche, as it relates to structures of self-identity and the production of meaning.  On this basis, she argues for a new political orientation that would address the compelling force of belief within the secular world.